Sheila writes: Today, October 30, is the 75th anniversary of the
historic 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast, presented by Orson Welles
and his merry band of Mercury Theater friends. In Peter Bogdanovich's
book "This is Orson Welles", Welles tells Bogdanovich: "Six minutes
after we’d gone on the air, the switchboards in radio stations right
across the country were lighting up like Christmas trees. Houses were
emptying, churches were filling up; from Nashville to Minneapolis there
was wailing in the street and the rending of garments. Twenty minutes
in, and we had a control room full of very bewildered cops. They didn’t
know who to arrest or for what, but they did lend a certain tone to the
remainder of the broadcast. We began to realize, as we plowed on with
the destruction of New Jersey, that the extent of our
American lunatic fringe had been underestimated." Bogdanovich later
says to Welles, "The Martian broadcast didn’t really hurt you at all.
Would you say it was lucky?" Welles replied, "Well, it put me in the
movies. Was that lucky? I don’t know." Here is the original radio
broadcast in all its mockumentary glory.